By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 2012’s epic The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first entry in one of the most successful and beloved movie series of all time.
Just as Peter Jackson couldn’t bring himself to wrap up The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, and just as J.R.R Tolkien’s books continue to inspire adaptation after adaptation (yes, nerds, the third season of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power “drops” this week), so The Butcher continues to wield his cleaver on one of the most dull and inexplicable film series of all time.
Yes, The Butcher has had the major misfortune of seeing all of Peter Jackson’s turgid, hobbit-filled, Lord Of The Rings cinematic nightmares (all 9,000 hours of them!), and they all suck massive orc’s balls. But with 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Jacko achieved something truly extraordinary: he actually kick-started an even more tedious, long-winded, and unnecessarily narrative-heavy movie franchise, actually blowing Lord Of The Rings out of the water in terms of pure stupidity.
Really, Jacko? The Hobbit!? How desperate can you get? This novel was on the syllabus when The Butcher was in primary school…back when dinosaurs ruled the earth! Furthermore, it’s essentially a kids’ book…and Jacko made it into three whole movies! Doesn’t this guy know about the concept of editing, and whittling a story down to its essentials? He’s like a child that won’t stop playing with his cruddy, busted-up favourite toys, even when his parents offer him the chance to play with exciting new ones that they’ve just stolen from Toys R Us.
The funniest thing about The Hobbit is that Jacko seems to know that it’s kind of lame and threadbare, so he’s added all manner of bits and bobs to not only make it stretch over three ridiculously long films and make it seem more “deep” and “complex”, but to also tie it in with the inexplicably popular Lord Of The Rings movies.
Thus, Orlando Bloom returns as arrow-slinging pretty boy, Legolas, even though he’s not in the book of The Hobbit, while Evangeline Lilly’s character, Tauriel, has been invented solely for the film. In what kind of big screen adaptation does a director create new characters? Did director Joe Wright fling anyone new into his still-shithouse take on Jane Austen’s hoary old novel, Pride & Prejudice? Did Fifty Shades Of Grey have a dwarf in it? Actually, maybe it should have.
Anyway, the point is that Peter Jackson took a very small piece of string and stretched it so hard that it eventually snapped. At the time of the release of the final film in The Hobbit Trilogy, The Butcher really hoped this was the end of the whole Lord Of The Rings series…oh, how wrong he was.
